Crappy site - is backlinks enough?

I have a client with a crappy flash-based site, and no amount of conversation with change that. They are in a long term contract. I can influence some titles, perhaps a few metas, but otherwise we are stuck with just making a few pages here and there with text on them. I would therefore assume that what I will get is a crappy domain like www.clientcrapsite.com/news/newpage2.asp or something like that.

With that being said, he wants to rank for a regional phrase, let's say "Texas tractor dealer" (not the actual phrase). There are some competitors, and SENUKE rates them as "extremely easy". There are 13,500 serps when the phrase in in quotes. Client is currently top 10 for this phrase.

With this being said, would anchored backlinks from high PR sites be enough to get them to the top? We did some ePR and boosted them up there from the third page to the first but as expected they are quickly dropping.

Any thoughts on optimizing to rank a crap site that is mostly Flash with limited access to the code/developer?

We may make a blog (gratis) but that will have 0 pagerank and a new domain so that may take even longer . Thoughts or suggestions?

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